Do you forget songs you've learned as soon as you stop playing them?

Do you find it difficult to recognise motifs when playing by ear?

Don't settle for poor memory!

As you’ll discover in this article & video, there are ways we can train our memories to hold onto patterns in our short-term memory and recall entire pieces of repertoire in our long-term memory.

Memory & Music

People have an amazing ability to remember music. Chances are you can recognize your favorite song after hearing just a fragment. These memories are stored in the hippocampus where listening to music produces new neurons and improves memory.

However, simply remembering how a tune goes, or what the lyrics are, is just one type of memory used with music.

There are actually many kinds of memory used in music. According to TheMusiciansBrain.com:

All information enters the brain through our senses – or sensory memory. When we are learning a piece, we take in visual, auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive information.
We see the notes, hear what they sound like, feel the pattern on the keys, and feel where our body is in space as we are playing those notes.

Short-term memory & chunking:

The capacity of short-term memory can be increased by chunking individual pieces of information into larger patterns, basically recoding the information in the brain.

For example, 10021938 are near the outer limit of what the brain can hold in Short-Term Memory. But if we think of that number in 3 chunks – month, day, year (10-02-1938), rather than 8 digits, it now becomes easier to remember.

Or the notes C, E, G, B-flat could be thought of as one chunk, a dominant 7th chord on C, rather than four individual pitches, thus leaving room for 5 or 6 additional chunks of information in Short-Term Memory.

Chunking is based on prior knowledge. You would have to have some knowledge of music theory to know that C,E,G, B-flat can be seen as a dominant 7th chord. So the more knowledge we have of music theory the more we are able to chunk the information of a song!

So now you see yet ANOTHER reason why learning theory to understand music is so important!

Transfer to Long Term Memory

Short-term memory disappears unless we make an effort to transfer it to long-term memory, which is what we do when we learn a piece of music; we are encoding the information into long-term memory.

We do this through repetition & practise mostly, but there are other methods of hurrying this process along:

identifying patterns and relationships,
learning more about the piece, composer, and the culture or era it was composed in,
identifying the emotions this piece of music brings up or the story it tells,
associating pictures or memories with it….

We naturally look for patterns and relationships within life - when we do it with music we can memorise how the piece goes from beginning to end. When we want to simulate this process, we simply look for patterns & relationships more purposefully.

Memory for Playing by Ear

When we play a song by ear, we are remembering how the song goes in order to hear it in our mind repeatedly and decipher which notes we hear.

So memorising how the song goes is one of the most important steps to playing by ear - this is why we say “listen, listen, listen” before you go to your instrument.

But it’s not just about memorising an entire song in order to play it.

Recognising smaller patterns in our short term memory, helps us to identify repetitions of those patterns when they reoccur - cutting down the amount of notes we need to decipher over a song (every song has repeated sections and motifs!).

If we didn’t develop a good memory for patterns then every melody we learned by ear would involve the deciphering of hundreds of notes in relation to each other.

Find one note, then distinguish the next note in relation to the last… and so on, for every single note!

But we don’t do that!

We find a few notes and then find that the first few notes are repeated - or the first few notes are then played in a different order and so on.

It becomes a process of recognising and remembering patterns as much as finding notes in relation to each other.

Conclusion.

Listening, learning & playing music uses many different areas of our brain and different types of memory too. If we want to improve our memory of music in order to memorise pieces off by heart, or to improve our playing by ear skill we need to:

Learn more music theory in order to identify relations & patterns in music.
Practise learning and memorising songs & pieces deliberately with chunking.
Research the music we learn in order to insert more meaning & motivation into the memorising process.
Observe the story & emotional connection you have with the song in order to capitalise on the memories response to emotion.